In January, I finally got around to releasing the first draft of my Spam remover extension. This extension finds spam in posts and private messages including very old spam that may be present on your board. It took longer than expected because work for clients comes first (as it pays money) but also because it turned out to be more time intensive than expected. The extension uses Akismet (mostly used to moderate WordPress comments) to make a spam determination and using the service is not necessarily free and requires a license. The most technically challenging part was the finding spam part, as some databases are huge. Based on my testing, you can’t expect Akismet to test more than about four posts per second, which means on larger boards finding all spam may take hours or days. Of course you can narrow the range to a date range. phpBB doesn’t have any great ways to handle long running tasks.
Otherwise, it was somewhat quiet doing work in January. Paid work included these jobs:
- I was asked to upgrade WikiMedia software on a site where the client also had a phpBB board. To make a long story short, I ultimately did not succeed. WikiMedia is not an area of expertise, the software installed was very old and even following the instructions carefully wasn’t enough. So I billed for a few hours of my time and provided a link to some Wikimedia consultants who should be able to finish my work.
- This was a strange job because the upgrade and rehosting that had to be done collaboratively in Teamviewer. In short, I was being watched and someone else was controlling the session. I worked collaboratively with a system administrator. The first attempt to upgrade the board from phpBB 3.1.11 to 3.3.2 failed for various reasons. Lots of issues were reported so eventually the decision was to move to phpBB 3.2.11 the following day, on the assumption that there was some instability issue with phpBB 3.3 and the hosting used. This went well and was faster than the first attempt. In this attempt, rather than make a custom style, changes were made to the Absolution style directly. Three extensions were added and some medium work CSS changes were made to add the old logo back, make it more black and adjust the margins. There were issues with emailing and on the first attempt bad form tokens on certain mobile devices that had to be resolved.
- Upgraded a board from phpBB 3.2.8 to 3.3.2. Fixed an email sending issue by changing port to use for sending email to port 465. Upgraded Absolution style and reapplied logo. Installed updated American English language pack. Updated Digests, Pages and Board Announcement extensions to latest versions. Tweaked the cron job created for digests to add app.php in the URL. I had to add two missing columns to a table used by the pages extension to fix errors that occurred. Changed reCaptcha to Version 3.
- Upgraded a board from phpBB 3.0.11 to 3.3.2. Installed SE Gamer Light style with a newer logo supplied by the client. Extensions installed: Tapatalk, Who Was Here, Recent Topics, National Flags, Thanks for the Posts, Collapsible Forum Categories, Add User and Advertisement Management. There was an issue with navigation bar overwriting part of logo text in the header background image. Could not connect with Tapatalk via the app. Not sure national flag settings were retained for each user. Thanks for the Posts extension zeroed out thanks totals as there is no migration process from the mod to the extension. But I was able to bring in all the old ads correctly from the old advertisement management extension. Renamed gb.png to uk.png because that flag was missing.
- An issue a client had was similar to one that happened in November when I helped him. Basically, digests stopped going out. Again, the fix was bad PHP syntax was written to the /cache/production/queue.php file. The only real fix was to delete the file again and hope it did not recur again. Thought it might be due to running out of quota on the server, but the client’s web host said this was not the issue Also manually removed the cron lock and reset digests.
- Updated a limit groups extension I wrote a couple of months earlier for a client. The error message now returns a relative number of hours, minutes and seconds until the user can make more posts or view more topics. Commented out old code in case it is wanted again.
- Upgraded a board from phpBB 3.2.8 to phpBB 3.3.2. Updated the ne_blackgreen style, Cleantalk and NavBar Search extensions. Removed some buttons from the footer that were no longer wanted.
- Troubleshooting ads mostly served by the advertisement management extension that should not show up for users in a new group that was created. Advertisment management extension looked set up properly to exclude this group. Two ads were served outside of the extension because the extension couldn’t place them where desired by the client. Changed the two locations in forumlist_body.html and overall_footer.html to add this new group_id = 34, which should not see the ad. Client reports it is still not working right. Unclear which ads are having this problem and if the issue is in the custom code I wrote, the advertisement management extension, or both. Suggested debugging in test environment.
- Upgraded a board from phpBB 3.2.0 to phpBB 3.3.2. Changed PHP from version 7.0 to 7.4. Supplied new logo but it didn’t quite fit, so I reapplied the old logo. Eventually replaced the logo with a cropped version of the new logo provided that would fit the header space. Standard prosilver style with no extensions. No issues during upgrade.
- Updated a commercial board from phpBB 3.3.1 to phpBB 3.3.3, which was just released on January 29. Updated digests extension from 3.3.2 to 3.3.4 and Google Analytics extension form 1.0.4 to 1.0.6. Updated base AllanStyle SUBSILVER style from 3.0.1 to 3.0.2. I was asked by the client if another forum could be merged with current forum – not currently possible. Changed a setting that capped uploads at 50MB to 100MB so more uploads could be made. Client may want me to create an extension to send top posts/topics to users on a regular basis.
